Report Legatio
The idea to start a journal completely devoted to early modern diplomacy sprang from the fruitful papers delivered at the Splendid Encounters conferences. During these annual meetings, it became clear that the subject of diplomacy generated a lot of interesting discussions, which deserved to be further investigated in a written outlet. With the support of the Polish Academy of Sciences’ Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History (Warsaw), this idea was materialised in the course of 2015 and resulted in a new history journal entitled Legatio: The Journal for Renaissance and Early Modern Diplomatic Studies was born. Legatio’s mission is to provide a forum to advance our understanding of the role of diplomats and the function of diplomacy in the Renaissance and early modern world, taking into account the traditional histories of politics, the arts, economics, law, and society, along with emerging histories of gender, exchange, identity, and communication. As such, Legatio seeks to present, disseminate, and promote research of the highest quality that provokes debate and challenges assumptions.
Once the work ‘behind the scenes’ was completed, Legatio was officially launched in June 2016. Now, half a year later, Legatio has received interesting contributions from a varied group of scholars, all with the same goal in mind: to explore various aspects of diplomatic history in order to broaden our understanding of an area of historical scholarship too long overlooked. The articles broach a wide range of topics, ranging from cultural diplomacy to the diplomatic household and food politics. In the coming months, these submissions will be subject to a double-blind peer review and language editing. We are looking forward to preparing the articles for publication and we are convinced that Legatio will be a positive contribution to the expanding field of the new diplomatic history. We hope to have the first issue online by autumn 2017.
The team of Legatio welcomes submissions for its second issue!
Laura Mesotten